Musings on sex & disability, accessible sex toys, and sexuality.

Parlour Talk, life, and health … or lack of.

A few months a go I announced a pet project of mine – Parlour Talk. It’s a project I’ve toyed with, and worked on for the past year or so in between my main job, health, and hobbies. But, unfortunately, over the past year my health seems to have deteriorated to the point where I’m able to do little more than watch far too many cooking shows, and the odd spot of work.

Side note: if you’ve never come across SortedFood before, I highly recommend subscribing to their channel, binging on their shows, then craving random food at 3am in the morning.

But … what’s actually going on?

For a little transparency, I’ve got a bunch of symptoms that don’t fit in with my usual aches and pains. The most prominent being neuropathic pain in both of my legs, feet, and face. The pain really isn’t joking around – I’m pretty used to chronic pain, but this one has the ability to override all coherent thought.

Over the past month or so I’ve figured out a routine with pain pills, CBD creams, CBD oils, yoga, and meditation to take the edge off, but most of my days are spent around a 6/7 on the pain scale depending on when my next dose of meds is due – this means it’s now manageable for me. Before it was a 8/9 … and on occasion a 10. I don’t say any of this lightly, but before I got it under control I did have a few night of ‘would I be justified in calling an ambulance’ for the pain. Thankfully, the doctors seem to be taking me somewhat seriously, and the pain is – at the moment, more under control.

Along with the pain I seem to be having notable vision problems. I’ve lost some sight in one of my eyes, and everything looks like a bad prescription change – hence all the typos that will inevitable litter future blog posts, tweets, and replies. When you stack everything up, it’s not looking too swell. I’m currently waiting on a bunch of tests, specialist appointments, and I’m fighting tooth and nail to be the best advocate I can for myself.

As to the cause, I have my suspicions, and so do the doctors, but until I get something a little more concrete I’m going to keep it close to the chest. I will admit, I’m a bit scared of my health at the moment – I’ve never really been what you could call ‘healthy’, but I was mostly functional. Nowadays, not so much. At the moment the best thing I can do for myself is to rest, pace myself, and distract myself with work. Audio books, YouTube, movies, and TV shows have been a saving grace recently.

But, back to Parlour Talk – I do plan to launch it properly by the end of the year. I want to start a sex positive, sex worker positive, and disability positive platform that’s inclusive and informative. If anything my recent inability to do nothing much more than distract myself with food porn has bolstered my desire to work on a project like this. But, I have to be realistic. I don’t want to start selling stock when I have problems making it out of the house, let alone the post office.

So, I have a tentative plan to sell some pin badges on Etsy, and slowly work on finishing the copy for ParlourTalk.com. As mentioned before, 50% of the red umbrella pin badge profits will be donated to sex worker positive charities. I also want to look at doing more freelance work, and try my hand at graphic design – I might as well do something productive in the blanket and pillow nest I’ve made myself!

If you got to the end of my little ramble, thank you. I hope to be post more often on this little blog now I’ve gotten this off my chest.